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94-689: While it is commonly believed that the Industrial Age was supplanted by the Information Age in the late 20th century, a view that has become common since the Revolutions of 1989 , much of the Third World economy is still based on manufacturing , although mobile phones are now commonplace even in the poorest of countries, enabling access to global information networks. Even though many developing countries remain largely industrial,

188-618: A business context, the Information Technology Association of America has defined information technology as "the study, design, development, application, implementation, support, or management of computer-based information systems". The responsibilities of those working in the field include network administration, software development and installation, and the planning and management of an organization's technology life cycle, by which hardware and software are maintained, upgraded, and replaced. Information services

282-542: A complete computing machine. During the Second World War , Colossus developed the first electronic digital computer to decrypt German messages. Although it was programmable , it was not general-purpose, being designed to perform only a single task. It also lacked the ability to store its program in memory; programming was carried out using plugs and switches to alter the internal wiring. The first recognizably modern electronic digital stored-program computer

376-475: A component of their 305 RAMAC computer system. Most digital data today is still stored magnetically on hard disks, or optically on media such as CD-ROMs . Until 2002 most information was stored on analog devices , but that year digital storage capacity exceeded analog for the first time. As of 2007 , almost 94% of the data stored worldwide was held digitally: 52% on hard disks, 28% on optical devices, and 11% on digital magnetic tape. It has been estimated that

470-523: A connection, and nearly half of Americans and people in several other countries used the Internet on a regular basis. However throughout the 1990s, "getting online" entailed complicated configuration, and dial-up was the only connection type affordable by individual users; the present day mass Internet culture was not possible. In 1989, about 15% of all households in the United States owned

564-517: A dedicated home video game console according to an Entertainment Software Association annual industry report . By 2012, over 2 billion people used the Internet, twice the number using it in 2007. Cloud computing had entered the mainstream by the early 2010s. In January 2013, a majority of U.S. survey respondents reported owning a smartphone . By 2016, half of the world's population was connected and as of 2020, that number has risen to 67%. In

658-618: A dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. By the early 1980s, along with improvements in computing power , the proliferation of the smaller and less expensive personal computers allowed for immediate access to information and the ability to share and store it. Connectivity between computers within organizations enabled access to greater amounts of information. The world's technological capacity to store information grew from 2.6 (optimally compressed ) exabytes (EB) in 1986 to 15.8 EB in 1993; over 54.5 EB in 2000; and to 295 (optimally compressed) EB in 2007. This

752-460: A human brain has been estimated to lie between 10^15 and 10^17. While this number is impressive, even in 2007 humanity's general-purpose computers were capable of performing well over 10^18 instructions per second. Estimates suggest that the storage capacity of an individual human brain is about 10^12 bytes. On a per capita basis, this is matched by current digital storage (5x10^21 bytes per 7.2x10^9 people). Genetic code may also be considered part of

846-542: A large demand for British goods. Britain also had one of the largest spheres of influence due to its massive navy and merchant marine . The British government's concern for commercial interests was also important. The steam engine allowed for steamboats and the locomotives, which made transportation much faster. By the mid-19th century the Industrial Revolution had spread to Continental Europe and North America , and since then it has spread to most of

940-450: A more efficient manner are usually seen as "just the cost of doing business." IT departments are allocated funds by senior leadership and must attempt to achieve the desired deliverables while staying within that budget. Government and the private sector might have different funding mechanisms, but the principles are more-or-less the same. This is an often overlooked reason for the rapid interest in automation and Artificial Intelligence , but

1034-409: A network of networks. The Whole Earth movement of the 1960s advocated the use of new technology. In the 1970s, the home computer was introduced, time-sharing computers , the video game console , the first coin-op video games, and the golden age of arcade video games began with Space Invaders . As digital technology proliferated, and the switch from analog to digital record keeping became

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1128-417: A particular letter; possible delays in message delivery (up to several days); limits on the size of one message and on the total size of messages in the mailbox (personal for users). A software and hardware complex with a web interface that provides the ability to search for information on the Internet. A search engine usually means a site that hosts the interface (front-end) of the system. The software part of

1222-455: A personal computer. For households with children, nearly 30% owned a computer in 1989, and in 2000, 65% owned one. Cell phones became as ubiquitous as computers by the early 2000s, with movie theaters beginning to show ads telling people to silence their phones. They also became much more advanced than phones of the 1990s, most of which only took calls or at most allowed for the playing of simple games. Text messaging became widely used in

1316-405: A search engine is a search engine (search engine) — a set of programs that provides the functionality of a search engine and is usually a trade secret of the search engine developer company. Most search engines look for information on World Wide Web sites, but there are also systems that can look for files on FTP servers, items in online stores, and information on Usenet newsgroups. Improving search

1410-399: A single MOS chip by the late 1960s. The application of MOS LSI chips to computing was the basis for the first microprocessors , as engineers began recognizing that a complete computer processor could be contained on a single MOS LSI chip. In 1968, Fairchild engineer Federico Faggin improved MOS technology with his development of the silicon-gate MOS chip, which he later used to develop

1504-486: A single spinning wheel, and Richard Arkwright made it driven by water. Later Arkwright opened a spinning mill which marked the beginning of the factory system . In 1785, Edmund Cartwright invented a loom which was powered by water. In 1712, Thomas Newcomen produced the first successful steam engine , and in 1769, James Watt patented the modern steam engine. As a result, steam replaced water as industry's major power source. The steam engine allowed for steamboats and

1598-403: A standard until the mid-2000s outside Japan. The World Wide Web became publicly accessible in 1991, which had been available only to government and universities. In 1993 Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina introduced Mosaic , the first web browser capable of displaying inline images and the basis for later browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. Stanford Federal Credit Union

1692-464: A technology now obsolete. Electronic data storage, which is used in modern computers, dates from World War II, when a form of delay-line memory was developed to remove the clutter from radar signals, the first practical application of which was the mercury delay line. The first random-access digital storage device was the Williams tube , which was based on a standard cathode ray tube . However,

1786-487: Is a term somewhat loosely applied to a variety of IT-related services offered by commercial companies, as well as data brokers . The field of information ethics was established by mathematician Norbert Wiener in the 1940s. Some of the ethical issues associated with the use of information technology include: Research suggests that IT projects in business and public administration can easily become significant in scale. Work conducted by McKinsey in collaboration with

1880-433: Is also worth noting that from a business perspective, Information technology departments are a " cost center " the majority of the time. A cost center is a department or staff which incurs expenses, or "costs", within a company rather than generating profits or revenue streams. Modern businesses rely heavily on technology for their day-to-day operations, so the expenses delegated to cover technology that facilitates business in

1974-566: Is commonly held in relational databases to take advantage of their "robust implementation verified by years of both theoretical and practical effort." As an evolution of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), XML's text-based structure offers the advantage of being both machine- and human-readable . Data transmission has three aspects: transmission, propagation, and reception. It can be broadly categorized as broadcasting , in which information

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2068-768: Is generally an information system , a communications system , or, more specifically speaking, a computer system — including all hardware , software , and peripheral equipment — operated by a limited group of IT users, and an IT project usually refers to the commissioning and implementation of an IT system. IT systems play a vital role in facilitating efficient data management, enhancing communication networks, and supporting organizational processes across various industries. Successful IT projects require meticulous planning, seamless integration, and ongoing maintenance to ensure optimal functionality and alignment with organizational objectives. Although humans have been storing, retrieving, manipulating, and communicating information since

2162-507: Is one of the priorities of the modern Internet (see the Deep Web article about the main problems in the work of search engines). Companies in the information technology field are often discussed as a group as the "tech sector" or the "tech industry." These titles can be misleading at times and should not be mistaken for "tech companies;" which are generally large scale, for-profit corporations that sell consumer technology and software. It

2256-424: Is still widely deployed more than 50 years later. IMS stores data hierarchically , but in the 1970s Ted Codd proposed an alternative relational storage model based on set theory and predicate logic and the familiar concepts of tables, rows, and columns. In 1981, the first commercially available relational database management system (RDBMS) was released by Oracle . All DMS consist of components, they allow

2350-421: Is the informational equivalent to less than one 730- megabyte (MB) CD-ROM per person in 1986 (539 MB per person); roughly four CD-ROM per person in 1993; twelve CD-ROM per person in the year 2000; and almost sixty-one CD-ROM per person in 2007. It is estimated that the world's capacity to store information has reached 5 zettabytes in 2014, the informational equivalent of 4,500 stacks of printed books from

2444-417: Is transmitted unidirectionally downstream, or telecommunications , with bidirectional upstream and downstream channels. XML has been increasingly employed as a means of data interchange since the early 2000s, particularly for machine-oriented interactions such as those involved in web-oriented protocols such as SOAP , describing "data-in-transit rather than... data-at-rest". Hilbert and Lopez identify

2538-581: The Deltar for water management in the Netherlands, network analyzers for electrical systems, and various machines for aiming military guns and bombs. The construction of problem-specific analog computers continued in the late 1940s and beyond, with FERMIAC for neutron transport, Project Cyclone for various military applications, and the Phillips Machine for economic modeling. Building on

2632-528: The Intel 4004 , the first single-chip microprocessor. It was released by Intel in 1971, and laid the foundations for the microcomputer revolution that began in the 1970s. MOS technology also led to the development of semiconductor image sensors suitable for digital cameras . The first such image sensor was the charge-coupled device , developed by Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith at Bell Labs in 1969, based on MOS capacitor technology. The public

2726-399: The Internet , which was equivalent to 51 million households. Along with the Internet, new types of technology were also being introduced across the globe, which has improved efficiency and made things easier across the globe. Along with technology revolutionizing society, millions of processes could be done in seconds. Innovations in communication were also crucial as people began to rely on

2820-566: The LEO being the first commercially available general-purpose computer. Digital communication became economical for widespread adoption after the invention of the personal computer in the 1970s. Claude Shannon , a Bell Labs mathematician, is credited for having laid out the foundations of digitalization in his pioneering 1948 article, A Mathematical Theory of Communication . In 1948, Bardeen and Brattain patented an insulated-gate transistor (IGFET) with an inversion layer. Their concept, forms

2914-609: The Netherlands became the first countries to completely transition from analog to digital television . In September 2007, a majority of U.S. survey respondents reported having broadband internet at home. According to estimates from the Nielsen Media Research , approximately 45.7 million U.S. households in 2006 (or approximately 40 percent of approximately 114.4 million) owned a dedicated home video game console , and by 2015, 51 percent of U.S. households owned

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3008-472: The T-carrier for long-haul pulse-code modulation (PCM) digital voice transmission. The T1 format carried 24 pulse-code modulated, time-division multiplexed speech signals each encoded in 64 kbit/s streams, leaving 8 kbit/s of framing information which facilitated the synchronization and demultiplexing at the receiver. Over the subsequent decades the digitisation of voice became the norm for all but

3102-401: The digital technology that would follow decades later to replace analog microform with digital imaging , storage , and transmission media , whereby vast increases in the rapidity of information growth would be made possible through automated , potentially- lossless digital technologies. Accordingly, Moore's law , formulated around 1965, would calculate that the number of transistors in

3196-567: The earth to the sun . The amount of digital data stored appears to be growing approximately exponentially , reminiscent of Moore's law . As such, Kryder's law prescribes that the amount of storage space available appears to be growing approximately exponentially. The world's technological capacity to receive information through one-way broadcast networks was 432 exabytes of (optimally compressed ) information in 1986; 715 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 1993; 1.2 (optimally compressed) zettabytes in 2000; and 1.9 zettabytes in 2007,

3290-485: The information revolution . Now that sequencing has been computerized, genome can be rendered and manipulated as data. This started with DNA sequencing , invented by Walter Gilbert and Allan Maxam in 1976-1977 and Frederick Sanger in 1977, grew steadily with the Human Genome Project , initially conceived by Gilbert and finally, the practical applications of sequencing, such as gene testing , after

3384-479: The journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution in 2016 reported that: Digital technology has vastly exceeded the cognitive capacity of any single human being and has done so a decade earlier than predicted. In terms of capacity, there are two measures of importance: the number of operations a system can perform and the amount of information that can be stored. The number of synaptic operations per second in

3478-419: The planar process developed by Jean Hoerni . In 1963, complementary MOS (CMOS) was developed by Chih-Tang Sah and Frank Wanlass at Fairchild Semiconductor . The self-aligned gate transistor, which further facilitated mass production, was invented in 1966 by Robert Bower at Hughes Aircraft and independently by Robert Kerwin, Donald Klein and John Sarace at Bell Labs. In 1962 AT&T deployed

3572-474: The slide rule and mechanical calculators . By the early 1800s, the Industrial Revolution had produced mass-market calculators like the arithmometer and the enabling technology of the punch card . Charles Babbage proposed a mechanical general-purpose computer called the Analytical Engine , but it was never successfully built, and was largely forgotten by the 20th century and unknown to most of

3666-432: The 16th century, and it was not until 1645 that the first mechanical calculator capable of performing the four basic arithmetical operations was developed. Electronic computers , using either relays or valves , began to appear in the early 1940s. The electromechanical Zuse Z3 , completed in 1941, was the world's first programmable computer, and by modern standards one of the first machines that could be considered

3760-407: The 1980s the digital format of optical compact discs gradually replaced analog formats, such as vinyl records and cassette tapes , as the popular medium of choice. Humans have manufactured tools for counting and calculating since ancient times, such as the abacus , astrolabe , equatorium , and mechanical timekeeping devices. More complicated devices started appearing in the 1600s, including

3854-528: The 1990s, the spread of the Internet caused a sudden leap in access to and ability to share information in businesses and homes globally. A computer that cost $ 3000 in 1997 would cost $ 2000 two years later and $ 1000 the following year, due to the rapid advancement of technology. The world's technological capacity to compute information with human-guided general-purpose computers grew from 3.0 × 10 MIPS in 1986, to 4.4 × 10 MIPS in 1993; to 2.9 × 10 MIPS in 2000; to 6.4 × 10 MIPS in 2007. An article featured in

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3948-497: The Industrial Age. Life expectancy today worldwide is more than twice as high as it was when the Industrial Revolution began. Information Age The Information Age is a historical period that began in the mid-20th century. It is characterized by a rapid shift from traditional industries, as established during the Industrial Revolution , to an economy centered on information technology . The onset of

4042-639: The Information Age has been linked to the development of the transistor in 1947 and the optical amplifier in 1957. These technological advances have had a significant impact on the way information is processed and transmitted. According to the United Nations Public Administration Network , the Information Age was formed by capitalizing on computer miniaturization advances, which led to modernized information systems and internet communications as

4136-576: The Information Age is increasingly on the ground. Huge changes in agricultural methods made the Industrial Revolution possible. This agricultural revolution started with changes in farming in the Netherlands, later developed by the British. The Industrial Age began in Great Britain in the mid 18th century and was fueled by coal mining from places such as Wales and County Durham . The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain because it had

4230-410: The Internet alone while e-commerce a decade later resulted in $ 289 billion in sales. And as computers are rapidly becoming more sophisticated by the day, they are becoming more used as people are becoming more reliant on them during the twenty-first century. Early electronic computers such as Colossus made use of punched tape , a long strip of paper on which data was represented by a series of holes,

4324-606: The Scientific Age and the Industrial Age all, ultimately, induced discontinuous and irreversible changes in the economic, social and cultural elements of the daily life of most people. Traditionally, these epochs have taken place over hundreds, or in the case of the Neolithic Revolution, thousands of years, whereas the Information Age swept to all parts of the globe in just a few years, as a result of

4418-404: The United States; their first survey showed that 8.2% of all U.S. households owned a personal computer in 1984, and that households with children under the age of 18 were nearly twice as likely to own one at 15.3% (middle and upper middle class households were the most likely to own one, at 22.9%). By 1989, 15% of all U.S. households owned a computer, and nearly 30% of households with children under

4512-417: The ability to transfer both plain text and formatted, as well as arbitrary files; independence of servers (in the general case, they address each other directly); sufficiently high reliability of message delivery; ease of use by humans and programs. Disadvantages of e-mail: the presence of such a phenomenon as spam (massive advertising and viral mailings); the theoretical impossibility of guaranteed delivery of

4606-459: The age of 18 owned one. By the late 1980s, many businesses were dependent on computers and digital technology. Motorola created the first mobile phone, Motorola DynaTac , in 1983. However, this device used analog communication - digital cell phones were not sold commercially until 1991 when the 2G network started to be opened in Finland to accommodate the unexpected demand for cell phones that

4700-527: The appearance of the term in 1990 contained within documents for the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Innovations in technology have already revolutionized the world by the twenty-first century as people were able to access different online services. This has changed the workforce drastically as thirty percent of U.S. workers were already in careers in this profession. 136.9 million people were personally connected to

4794-567: The application of statistical and mathematical methods to decision-making , and the simulation of higher-order thinking through computer programs. The term is commonly used as a synonym for computers and computer networks , but it also encompasses other information distribution technologies such as television and telephones . Several products or services within an economy are associated with information technology, including computer hardware , software , electronics, semiconductors, internet , telecom equipment , and e-commerce . Based on

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4888-470: The basis of CMOS and DRAM technology today. In 1957 at Bell Labs, Frosch and Derick were able to manufacture planar silicon dioxide transistors, later a team at Bell Labs demonstrated a working MOSFET. The first integrated circuit milestone was achieved by Jack Kilby in 1958. Other important technological developments included the invention of the monolithic integrated circuit chip by Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959, made possible by

4982-494: The complexity of the Z1 and Z2 , German inventor Konrad Zuse used electromechanical systems to complete in 1941 the Z3 , the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer. Also during World War II, Allied engineers constructed electromechanical bombes to break German Enigma machine encoding. The base-10 electromechanical Harvard Mark I was completed in 1944, and

5076-464: The computer to communicate through telephone lines and cable. The introduction of the email was considered revolutionary as "companies in one part of the world could communicate by e-mail with suppliers and buyers in another part of the world..." Not only personally, computers and technology have also revolutionized the marketing industry, resulting in more buyers of their products. During the year of 2002, Americans exceeded $ 28 billion in goods just over

5170-419: The constant pressure to do more with less is opening the door for automation to take control of at least some minor operations in large companies. Many companies now have IT departments for managing the computers , networks, and other technical areas of their businesses. Companies have also sought to integrate IT with business outcomes and decision-making through a BizOps or business operations department. In

5264-431: The data they store to be accessed simultaneously by many users while maintaining its integrity. All databases are common in one point that the structure of the data they contain is defined and stored separately from the data itself, in a database schema . In recent years, the extensible markup language (XML) has become a popular format for data representation. Although XML data can be stored in normal file systems , it

5358-849: The discovery by Myriad Genetics of the BRCA1 breast cancer gene mutation. Sequence data in Genbank has grown from the 606 genome sequences registered in December 1982 to the 231 million genomes in August 2021. An additional 13 trillion incomplete sequences are registered in the Whole Genome Shotgun submission database as of August 2021. The information contained in these registered sequences has doubled every 18 months. During rare times in human history, there have been periods of innovation that have transformed human life. The Neolithic Age ,

5452-761: The driving force of social evolution . There is ongoing debate concerning whether the Third Industrial Revolution has already ended and if the Fourth Industrial Revolution has already begun due to the recent breakthroughs in areas such as artificial intelligence and biotechnologies. This next transition has been theorized to harken the advent of the Imagination Age . The digital revolution converted technology from analog format to digital format. By doing this, it became possible to make copies that were identical to

5546-504: The earliest writing systems were developed, the term information technology in its modern sense first appeared in a 1958 article published in the Harvard Business Review ; authors Harold J. Leavitt and Thomas L. Whisler commented that "the new technology does not yet have a single established name. We shall call it information technology (IT)." Their definition consists of three categories: techniques for processing,

5640-566: The emergence of information and communications technology (ICT). By the year of 1984, according to the National Westminster Bank Quarterly Review , the term information technology had been redefined as "The development of cable television was made possible by the convergence of telecommunications and computing technology (…generally known in Britain as information technology)." We then begin to see

5734-404: The exponential pace of technological change (a kind of Moore's law ): machines' application-specific capacity to compute information per capita roughly doubled every 14 months between 1986 and 2007; the per capita capacity of the world's general-purpose computers doubled every 18 months during the same two decades; the global telecommunication capacity per capita doubled every 34 months;

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5828-499: The factors of production, land (all natural resources), capital, and labour. Britain had plenty of harbors that enabled trade, Britain had access to capital, such as goods and money, for example, tools, machinery, equipment, and inventory. Britain, lastly, had an abundance of labor, or industrial workers in this case. There are many other conditions that help show why the Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain. The British Isles and colonies overseas represented huge markets that created

5922-455: The field of data mining  — "the process of discovering interesting patterns and knowledge from large amounts of data"  — emerged in the late 1980s. The technology and services it provides for sending and receiving electronic messages (called "letters" or "electronic letters") over a distributed (including global) computer network. In terms of the composition of elements and the principle of operation, electronic mail practically repeats

6016-455: The first planar silicon dioxide transistors by Frosch and Derick in 1957, the MOSFET demonstration by a Bell Labs team. the planar process by Jean Hoerni in 1959, and the microprocessor invented by Ted Hoff , Federico Faggin , Masatoshi Shima , and Stanley Mazor at Intel in 1971. These important inventions led to the development of the personal computer (PC) in the 1970s, and

6110-501: The first transistorized computer developed at the University of Manchester and operational by November 1953, consumed only 150 watts in its final version. Several other breakthroughs in semiconductor technology include the integrated circuit (IC) invented by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959, silicon dioxide surface passivation by Carl Frosch and Lincoln Derick in 1955,

6204-408: The following year. In 2002, a majority of U.S. survey respondents reported having a mobile phone . In late 2005 the population of the Internet reached 1 billion, and 3 billion people worldwide used cell phones by the end of the decade. HDTV became the standard television broadcasting format in many countries by the end of the decade. In September and December 2006 respectively, Luxembourg and

6298-626: The groundwork for the advent of civilization. The Scientific Age began in the period between Galileo 's 1543 proof that the planets orbit the Sun and Newton 's publication of the laws of motion and gravity in Principia in 1697. This age of discovery continued through the 18th century, accelerated by widespread use of the moveable type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg . The Industrial Age began in Great Britain in 1760 and continued into

6392-426: The information equivalent of 174 newspapers per person per day. The world's effective capacity to exchange information through two-way Telecommunications networks was 281 petabytes of (optimally compressed) information in 1986; 471 petabytes in 1993; 2.2 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2000; and 65 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2007, the information equivalent of six newspapers per person per day. In

6486-488: The information stored in it and delay-line memory was volatile in the fact that it had to be continuously refreshed, and thus was lost once power was removed. The earliest form of non-volatile computer storage was the magnetic drum , invented in 1932 and used in the Ferranti Mark 1 , the world's first commercially available general-purpose electronic computer. IBM introduced the first hard disk drive in 1956, as

6580-538: The introduction of computer science-related courses in K-12 education . Ideas of computer science were first mentioned before the 1950s under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University , where they had discussed and began thinking of computer circuits and numerical calculations. As time went on, the field of information technology and computer science became more complex and

6674-609: The inventors of modern computers. The Second Industrial Revolution in the last quarter of the 19th century developed useful electrical circuits and the telegraph . In the 1880s, Herman Hollerith developed electromechanical tabulating and calculating devices using punch cards and unit record equipment , which became widespread in business and government. Meanwhile, various analog computer systems used electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic systems to model problems and calculate answers. These included an 1872 tide-predicting machine , differential analysers , perpetual calendar machines,

6768-440: The last mile (where analogue continued to be the norm right into the late 1990s). Following the development of MOS integrated circuit chips in the early 1960s, MOS chips reached higher transistor density and lower manufacturing costs than bipolar integrated circuits by 1964. MOS chips further increased in complexity at a rate predicted by Moore's law , leading to large-scale integration (LSI) with hundreds of transistors on

6862-700: The late 1980s, less than 1% of the world's technologically stored information was in digital format, while it was 94% in 2007, with more than 99% by 2014. It is estimated that the world's capacity to store information has increased from 2.6 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 1986, to some 5,000 exabytes in 2014 (5 zettabytes ). Library expansion was calculated in 1945 by Fremont Rider to double in capacity every 16 years where sufficient space made available. He advocated replacing bulky, decaying printed works with miniaturized microform analog photographs , which could be duplicated on-demand for library patrons and other institutions. Rider did not foresee, however,

6956-522: The late 1990s worldwide, except for in the United States of America where text messaging didn't become commonplace till the early 2000s. The digital revolution became truly global in this time as well - after revolutionizing society in the developed world in the 1990s, the digital revolution spread to the masses in the developing world in the 2000s. By 2000, a majority of U.S. households had at least one personal computer and internet access

7050-424: The locomotives, which made transportation much faster. By the mid-19th century the Industrial Revolution had spread to Continental Europe and North America , and since then it has spread to most of the world. The Industrial Age is defined by mass production , broadcasting , the rise of the nation state , power , modern medicine and running water . The quality of human life has increased dramatically during

7144-409: The mid-19th century. The invention of machines such as the mechanical textile weaver by Edmund Cartwrite, the rotating shaft steam engine by James Watt and the cotton gin by Eli Whitney , along with processes for mass manufacturing, came to serve the needs of a growing global population. The Industrial Age harnessed steam and waterpower to reduce the dependence on animal and human physical labor as

7238-589: The new standard in business, a relatively new job description was popularized, the data entry clerk . Culled from the ranks of secretaries and typists from earlier decades, the data entry clerk's job was to convert analog data (customer records, invoices, etc.) into digital data. In developed nations, computers achieved semi-ubiquity during the 1980s as they made their way into schools, homes, business, and industry. Automated teller machines , industrial robots , CGI in film and television, electronic music , bulletin board systems , and video games all fueled what became

7332-420: The original. In digital communications, for example, repeating hardware was able to amplify the digital signal and pass it on with no loss of information in the signal. Of equal importance to the revolution was the ability to easily move the digital information between media, and to access or distribute it remotely. One turning point of the revolution was the change from analog to digitally recorded music. During

7426-541: The primary means of production. Thus, the core of the Industrial Revolution was the generation and distribution of energy from coal and water to produce steam and, later in the 20th century, electricity. Information technology Information technology ( IT ) is a set of related fields that encompass computer systems, software , programming languages , and data and information processing, and storage. IT forms part of information and communications technology (ICT). An information technology system ( IT system )

7520-1332: The rapidly advancing speed of information exchange. Between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago during the Neolithic period, humans began to domesticate animals, began to farm grains and to replace stone tools with ones made of metal. These innovations allowed nomadic hunter-gatherers to settle down. Villages formed along the Yangtze River in China in 6,500 B.C., the Nile River region of Africa and in Mesopotamia ( Iraq ) in 6,000 B.C. Cities emerged between 6,000 B.C. and 3,500 B.C. The development of written communication ( cuneiform in Sumeria and hieroglyphs in Egypt in 3,500 B.C. and writing in Egypt in 2,560 B.C. and in Minoa and China around 1,450 B.C.) enabled ideas to be preserved for extended periods to spread extensively. In all, Neolithic developments, augmented by writing as an information tool, laid

7614-503: The storage and processing technologies employed, it is possible to distinguish four distinct phases of IT development: pre-mechanical (3000 BC — 1450 AD), mechanical (1450 — 1840), electromechanical (1840 — 1940), and electronic (1940 to present). Information technology is a branch of computer science , defined as the study of procedures, structures, and the processing of various types of data. As this field continues to evolve globally, its priority and importance have grown, leading to

7708-417: The system of regular (paper) mail, borrowing both terms (mail, letter, envelope, attachment, box, delivery, and others) and characteristic features — ease of use, message transmission delays, sufficient reliability and at the same time no guarantee of delivery. The advantages of e-mail are: easily perceived and remembered by a person addresses of the form user_name@domain_name (for example, somebody@example.com);

7802-405: The world's storage capacity per capita required roughly 40 months to double (every 3 years); and per capita broadcast information has doubled every 12.3 years. Massive amounts of data are stored worldwide every day, but unless it can be analyzed and presented effectively it essentially resides in what have been called data tombs: "data archives that are seldom visited". To address that issue,

7896-401: The world. The cotton industry was the first industry to go through mechanization , the use of automatic machinery to increase production. The domestic system sprouted as a result of when businesses began importing raw cotton, employing spinners and weavers to make it into cloth from their home. James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny , which could produce eight times as much thread as

7990-403: The worldwide capacity to store information on electronic devices grew from less than 3  exabytes in 1986 to 295 exabytes in 2007, doubling roughly every 3 years. Database Management Systems (DMS) emerged in the 1960s to address the problem of storing and retrieving large amounts of data accurately and quickly. An early such system was IBM 's Information Management System (IMS), which

8084-478: The zeitgeist of the 1980s. Millions of people purchased home computers, making household names of early personal computer manufacturers such as Apple , Commodore, and Tandy. To this day the Commodore 64 is often cited as the best selling computer of all time, having sold 17 million units (by some accounts) between 1982 and 1994. In 1984, the U.S. Census Bureau began collecting data on computer and Internet use in

8178-503: Was able to handle the processing of more data. Scholarly articles began to be published from different organizations. Looking at early computing, Alan Turing , J. Presper Eckert , and John Mauchly were considered some of the major pioneers of computer technology in the mid-1900s. Giving them such credit for their developments, most of their efforts were focused on designing the first digital computer. Along with that, topics such as artificial intelligence began to be brought up as Turing

8272-625: Was also invented in the late 1980s. Disney's CAPS system (created 1988) was used for a scene in 1989's The Little Mermaid and for all their animation films between 1990's The Rescuers Down Under and 2004's Home on the Range . Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. The first public digital HDTV broadcast was of the 1990 World Cup that June; it was played in 10 theaters in Spain and Italy. However, HDTV did not become

8366-486: Was becoming apparent in the late 1980s. Compute! magazine predicted that CD-ROM would be the centerpiece of the revolution, with multiple household devices reading the discs. The first true digital camera was created in 1988, and the first were marketed in December 1989 in Japan and in 1990 in the United States. By the early 2000s, digital cameras had eclipsed traditional film in popularity. Digital ink and paint

8460-496: Was beginning to question such technology of the time period. Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, probably initially in the form of a tally stick . The Antikythera mechanism , dating from about the beginning of the first century BC, is generally considered the earliest known mechanical analog computer , and the earliest known geared mechanism. Comparable geared devices did not emerge in Europe until

8554-500: Was first introduced to the concepts that led to the Internet when a message was sent over the ARPANET in 1969. Packet switched networks such as ARPANET, Mark I , CYCLADES , Merit Network , Tymnet , and Telenet , were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of protocols . The ARPANET in particular led to the development of protocols for internetworking , in which multiple separate networks could be joined into

8648-468: Was the Manchester Baby , which ran its first program on 21 June 1948. The development of transistors in the late 1940s at Bell Laboratories allowed a new generation of computers to be designed with greatly reduced power consumption. The first commercially available stored-program computer, the Ferranti Mark I , contained 4050 valves and had a power consumption of 25 kilowatts. By comparison,

8742-514: Was the first financial institution to offer online internet banking services to all of its members in October 1994. In 1996 OP Financial Group , also a cooperative bank , became the second online bank in the world and the first in Europe. The Internet expanded quickly, and by 1996, it was part of mass culture and many businesses listed websites in their ads. By 1999, almost every country had

8836-527: Was to some degree improved with inspiration from Charles Babbage's designs. In 1947, the first working transistor , the germanium -based point-contact transistor , was invented by John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain while working under William Shockley at Bell Labs . This led the way to more advanced digital computers . From the late 1940s, universities, military, and businesses developed computer systems to digitally replicate and automate previously manually performed mathematical calculations, with

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